60 Minutes - Sunday, August 4, 2019

Episode Date: August 5, 2019

In a span of 24 hours, 29 people were killed in 2 mass shootings. Anderson Cooper talks to the parents who have devoted their lives to helping survivors of mass shootings. Bill Whitaker reports on a law that allows Europeans take back their data from big tech companies. Scott Pelley gets a peak inside MIT's media lab, where life-changing inventions have been created. Those stories on tonight's "60 Minutes." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There are very few things that you can be certain of in life. But you can always be sure the sun will rise each morning. You can bet your bottom dollar that you'll always need air to breathe and water to drink. And, of course, you can rest assured that with Public Mobile's 5G subscription phone plans, you'll pay the same thing every month. With all of the mysteries that life has to offer, a few certainties can really go a long way. Subscribe today for the peace of mind you've been searching for. Public Mobile. Different is calling. What's better than a well-marbled

ribeye sizzling on the barbecue? A well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door. A well-marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver. What happens to survivors and victims' families after a mass shooting? It's an introduction. Mass shooting grief 101.

Meet Sandy and Lonnie Phillips. Since their daughter was murdered seven years ago, they've shown up at most of the major mass shootings, offering those in need a kind of survival guide to a grief few can imagine. I lost a brother to suicide, and a lot of people say, you're now part of a group which you never wished you would be part of. We do care about these people. We want to help them find their purpose and find their strength so that they can live their new normal.

Travel as deep into the earth as man has ever traveled, two miles down, to get to the veined rock that becomes this, liquid molten gold. But gold's not all. Scientists have found something else down here, something known as extreme life, which might also exist on Mars. So the Martians we meet in the future... Be prepared to be surprised, I would say. Welcome to the future, MIT's Media Lab, a place that follows crazy ideas wherever they may lead.

We get to think about the future. What does the world look like 10 years, 20 years, 30 years? What should it look like? Time to go to sleep. How about dream control? Robotic prosthetics? What's the largest city in Bulgaria? And what is the population?

Or connecting the human brain to the Internet. Sophia, 1.1 million? That is correct. You know, the best way to predict the future is to invent it. I'm Steve Croft. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Scott Pelley. I'm Anderson Cooper.

I'm Bill Whitaker. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. What's your next adventure? Everyone deserves a chance to do what they love. Pacific Life helps you reach financial goals while you go after your personal ones. Plans change over time and your financial solutions can too. Pacific Life has a variety of financial solutions that can help you complement your life goals and passions while managing the uncertainties. Backed by more than 150 years of experience, you can count on Pacific Life to be there so you can go out and keep living your best life. Pacific Life is one of the most dependable and experienced insurers in the industry and has been named one of the 2019 World's Most Ethical Companies by the Ethisphere Institute. The freedom to go after whatever is next for you, that's the power of Pacific.

Ask a financial professional about how Pacific Life can help give you the freedom to do what you love or visit www.pacificlife.com. This weekend, within the space of 24 hours, the United States suffered two mass shootings. Late Saturday morning, a lone gunman walked into a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, murdering 20 people and wounding at least 26 others. Then, in the early hours of this morning, on a street in an entertainment district in Dayton, Ohio, a gunman with an assault-style rifle killed nine and wounded at least 27 before police killed him. One of the horrors of these killings is how familiar they've become and how little seems to change,

except in the lives of the grieving friends and families left behind. Sandy and Lonnie Phillips know that grief firsthand. As we reported back in March, their daughter was killed seven years ago in a mass shooting. Since then, they've made it their mission to help others navigate the public and sometimes political aftermath of these tragedies. They travel the country trying to build a network of survivors, offering victims and families a kind of guide to a grief and a future few can imagine. Your identity has been stripped from you, you know, whether it's mother or daddy or father or sister or brother.

I no longer have that title. I no longer have that relationship. And when it's violence like ours was, that takes a long time to recover from. I think some people think that there's a timetable for grief. Oh, yeah. Do you get that? Oh, yeah. The five stages of grief, right?

And you go through all five of them and you think, okay, now I'm done. And they don't tell you, oh, no, you get to start it all again. And they're out of sequence. A lot of survivors just don't know that, especially going into it. You might find that what you have done

for the last 20 years of your life or 30 years of your life has absolutely no meaning to you anymore. And that was certainly the done for the last 20 years of your life or 30 years of your life has absolutely no meaning to you anymore. And that was certainly the case for us. It wasn't long after their daughter's murder that Sandy and Lonnie Phillips quit their jobs. They've gotten rid of most of their belongings and rented out their house so they can travel around the country to mass shootings, hoping to meet survivors and offer help.

The scene of a mass shooting is not an easy place to come to. It can be like walking into a stranger's funeral. We don't know each other yet, but we do now. But in grief, strangers can quickly become family. You've got a second mom here. We saw the Phillipses in Thousand Oaks, California, where 12 people were gunned down at a country music bar last November. It is one of the latest stops on their heartbreaking journey.

If you haven't lost somebody close to you, you can't comprehend it. Just days before they arrived here, they were in Pittsburgh, where 11 people were murdered at the Tree of Life Synagogue. It's so interesting, though, what you're doing. You're not trained therapists, you're not counselors, and yet you have upended your lives and reaching out in a very individual way to people. Yeah, it's compassion. That's what it is. Bottom line, it's about compassion. The compassion

we get from those people, too. It's not like it's a one-way deal. It was in 2012 that their daughter, Jessica Gowie, was murdered along with 11 others in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. She was 24 and an aspiring sports reporter. Can you take me back to that day? Yes. The young man that was with her, Brent, was like a son to us. And she decided that she wanted to take him to see the Batman movie. And when the shooting happened, they stood up and never made it out. Both of them?

Brent survived. He was shot trying to save her. He went into paramedic mode immediately because that's what he does for a living. And the phone rang. He called you from inside the theater? Yeah. And I could hear the screaming going on in the background. And he said, there's been a shooting.

And I said, are you okay? And he said, I think I've been shot twice. And I knew then that, okay, something's bad. And I said, where's Jesse? And he said, I tried. And I said, is she okay? And he said, I tried. And I said, is she okay? And he said, I did my best. I tried.

And I said, oh, God, Brent, don't tell me she's dead. And he said, I'm really sorry. And I started screaming. And she was sliding down the wall screaming. And I grabbed her and picked her up and took her to the couch. And she kept yelling, Jesse's dead. It's been six years now, almost seven, and there's not a day that goes by that we don't still get upset and still cry.

I lost a brother to suicide, and a lot of people say, you know, you're now part of a group which you never wished you would be part of. And it's a lifetime membership, and the cost of the dues was way, way, way too high. Sandy is 68, Lonnie 75. Toward US 101, Los Angeles. They've been living mostly on savings, Social Security, and goodwill. I know that you're on a deadline. Occasionally crashing with friends.

How are you guys doing? They started a non-profit organization called Survivors Empowered to offer advice and kinship in the wake of mass shootings. I've got a couple of recordings on this. But also to give families practical information, like how to deal with media attention or how to get a body home for a funeral. It's Lonnie, just checking in on you. There's things that happen to the families of people who've been shot in a mass killing that do not happen to families of somebody who has died under different circumstances.

Exactly. The worst part is finding out that the day your child has been killed that there are already websites that have popped up and Facebook pages that have popped up saying this is a false flag and this didn't happen. Did you have people saying Jessica wasn't real? Oh, yeah. She's a crisis actor. She wasn't real. She wasn't there. Yep.

You didn't lose a daughter? All the time. You never saw your sister's dead body. All the time. Since Jessica's murder, Sandy's son, Jordan, has been harassed and threatened by a man who, like many conspiracy theorists, claims there was no massacre in Aurora. It's hard to imagine, but similar harassment now happens to families almost every time there's a mass shooting. That's the worst kind of harm you can do to someone. And you're a devastated parent becoming more devastated. 315 and 314 for a shooting at Century Theater. After the massacre in Aurora, Sandy and Lonnie, who are gun owners themselves,

filed a lawsuit against companies that sold gear and ammunition to their daughter's killer over the internet. The judge threw out the case and ordered them to pay more than $200,000 to cover defendants' legal fees. A contract with them consulting. They had to declare bankruptcy and now consult for a gun control group to make ends meet. Paying that forward right here. But they say they keep that work separate from their outreach to survivors. We don't ever bring up guns when we go. We never bring up politics or guns. We don't advocate. We don't recruit. We don't do any of that stuff until somebody shows an interest. And we tell them, you know, you're not ready yet.

The course of their new lives has followed a roadmap of American tragedies. They started in Newtown, then went to Isla Vista, San Bernardino, Orlando, Las Vegas, Sutherland Springs, Parkland, Santa Fe, Pittsburgh, and Thousand Oaks. Each massacre is different, but the look Sandy and Lonnie see on the faces of those left behind is the same. You just can't believe it. You don't want to believe it. Anika and Mitch Duaret's 17-year-old son Nicholas, who had just earned a swimming scholarship to college, was murdered with 16 others in Parkland, Florida last year. I expect Nick to come home any day, or I walk through the house, or he's such a great kid.

Nick's younger brother, Alex, who was grazed by a bullet, doesn't talk much about what happened. He was in a classroom across the hall from Nick's when the shooting began. Their parents were nearby, waiting for school to let out. Then Alex called us and said,

Mom, I'm in the back of an ambulance. I was hit in the back of the head. And in my mind, I didn't really worry about Nicholas because there's 3,500 at that school. One child was shot. What's the odds of two of my kids being shot? And I took off to the hospital. And I said, Mitch, you can wait for Nicholas.

And I waited for Nicholas. Yeah. They waited for Nicholas. Yeah. They waited for 12 hours before finally being told Nicholas was dead. Within days, a mutual friend connected them with Sandy and Lonnie Phillips. Do you remember that first meeting? Yeah. Oh, of course. Of course. They had a house full of people. We felt a little bit like we were intruding on a very private moment, which we were, but for a good reason. We felt a little bit like we were intruding on a very private moment, which we were, but for a good reason. I was a little skeptical in the beginning, and I'm thinking to myself, what do they want from us? Why are they here?

After speaking to them, which we lasted for three hours. Three hours, that was the first minute. Yeah. And they took the time just to be here and just went out here for any other reason but for you guys. Because you're in a place that's just not of this normal life. Yeah. You can't imagine. When you open your house in the morning, you're just like, why should I get up today? Why should I do that? And it's just so painful to feel this pain the whole day. And then to meet somebody who has been through this,

and six years later, and they are getting out of bed. You could look at Sandy and actually see a way through, potentially. Right. What are some of the things you, kind of the list of things you warn a grieving parent? The list is, I know you don't want to get out of bed right now, but you're going to live through this in spite of it. Just know that it's going to take you a long time. That's number one. Number two, people are ripping you off right now as we're speaking. There's probably a GoFundMe page somewhere and raising funds for the families and that money

goes into their bank account. You'll never see it. So be careful who you trust. So it's an introduction. You know, mass shooting grief 101. To help them keep up, the Phillipses are trying to create a network of survivors who can quickly respond to mass shootings anywhere in the country. Volunteers like Shanna Caputo. She met Sandy and Lonnie in 2017 after surviving the massacre at a music festival in Las Vegas. When I first met them, I asked them if I could go to Parkland with them,

because that was after Vegas. And she was like, no, honey, you're not ready for this yet. She's telling her story, and I'm listening to her, and I'm going, oh, my God. Shanna showed Sandy the cell phone video she unintentionally recorded of the shooting. And I'm watching the video and I'm going, this is triggering me. I can't imagine what she has really gone through. What was happening around you? People were going down right away. I could hear the bullets whizzing right past my head.

You would just see them, like, jerk, and I don't know if I can say this, but you would see them just explode. The gunfire lasted more than ten minutes. Fifty-eight people were killed. For weeks afterward, Shanna says she was hardly able to leave her house. Sandy advised her to see a therapist who specializes in severe trauma. So after about four or five months of therapy, it was like a walnut and it cracked open, and I finally cried about it.

And I called Sandy, and I'm like, I cried. I cried I was all excited and I said I'm actually very happy now you can begin to put things together and and create the new you and now she's doing incredible work so this has been growing really ever since the shooting yeah the work Shanna Caputo is doing started last fall, after the bar shooting in Thousand Oaks, California, which is just miles from her house. She's now trying to help some of those survivors, the way Sandy and Lonnie Phillips helped her. Wouldn't it be easier for you to not be immersed in the world of mass shootings? You are immersed in a very dark world. But we don't see it as dark. We see it as shedding a little light. We care about these people. We want to help them find their purpose and find their strength so that they can live their new normal.

Sandy and Lonnie Phillips tell us they are heading to El Paso later this week. Over the years at 60 Minutes, we have been in more than a few tunnels. We explored Mexican drug lord El Chapo's subterranean escape routes, burrowed through a Roman villa buried by Mount Vesuvius, and traveled the depths of the New York City subway. But nothing prepared us for a place called Moab Katsong, a South African gold mine that extends nearly two miles beneath the surface. As we first reported last November, in their pursuit of gold, South Africans have dug the deepest holes on earth. The country was the world's top gold producer for decades.

Now the gold is running out. Just as these ultra-deep mines have attracted a new breed of miner on a very different quest, we went along for the adventure. In the early morning light, tall mine shafts loom over the Val River Basin two hours southwest of Johannesburg. This once was a booming gold field. Now, most mines lie abandoned. But Moab Katsong is bustling. Long before the sun rises, thousands of miners start lining up for the triple deck elevator called the cage. It's jammed, but more always push on. And early one morning, so did we. It's really snug in here. We are packed in as tight as sardines. The electric bells signal we're ready. And the cage drops slowly

at first, then picks up speed fast. We plunge 450 stories straight down. It's the longest elevator ride on earth. The cage rattles and whistles as we descend. The air gets more humid the deeper we go. Our lifeline to the surface is a machine called the manwinder. Massive coils of steel rope two inches thick that attach to the cage and unspool faster and faster. We dropped two miles in a couple of minutes and emerged in an underground city. This is like Grand Central Station in Russia.

To get to the goal, miners must walk miles through a vast maze of dimly lit tunnels. Sometimes you're lucky and can catch a ride But mostly you just walk For Leroy Lee, it's in the blood His father worked in the mines Now it's his turn His family depends on his job

The gold in these ultra-deep mines It's four, six people. It's my kids, my wife, my fiance, and my mother, my sister. The gold in these ultra-deep mines is found in narrow veins laced through the rock. Some are no wider than a pencil. It's cramped at the rock face, and we crouch alongside the miners as they work hunched over in the dark. The noise from the drills is deafening. Massive air conditioners cool the tunnels, but it can still reach 120 degrees down here. At the end of the shift, we had to rush not to miss the elevator back up. It doesn't wait for anyone.

And here's where all that breaking rock pays off, the smelter. The ore is smashed and pulverized in a grinder before being fed into a furnace. Manga Kasango, who runs the operation, told us we were the first TV crew to film the weekly ritual they call the pour. We all had to wear these special pajamas with no pockets so we couldn't steal anything. The heat was intense as the furnace reached almost 2,000 degrees. The gold turned to liquid and poured down into the molds. When I saw it the first time, I was like, wow. That's something that keeps me going on that.

When you hear people who have never seen gold or touched it, I feel like I'm more privileged. These bars will be refined again to 99.99% purity before they're sold for coins and jewelry. The mine used to process about 60 tons of gold a year. Now it's just a quarter of that. Still, the day we watched the pour, there was a pretty good haul. Wow. This is quite heavy.

Yes, it is. How much is this? 11 million rand. In U.S. dollars, we're talking 7.5 to 8 million U.S. dollars for what you poured today. Yes, definitely. That sounds like a good day. It's a good business. It's one thing to come here for the gold,

but now this harsh environment has attracted others, scientists hunting for what they call extreme life. We found water that's a billion years old. A billion years old. A billion years old. In these caves. Right. An international team led by Princeton geoscientist Tullis Anstott

and Belgian biologist Gaetan Bourgoni are pioneers in the search for life buried in the rock where no one thought it could survive. Bourgoni says his colleagues thought he was crazy when he took a sabbatical to try to prove there was life deep underground. Oh, come on, they said. You're going to go to South Africa for a year. You're going to look for something that does not exist there. They'd lost count of the number of trips to the bottom of the mines searching for life

hidden in the ancient water seeping through the rock. This is a completely different world down there. There are different rules. How so? The temperature is different, the pressure is different. I mean, it's a tough world down there for life. The next day, we went along with them to the deepest level of the mine. For them, it was just another day at the office.

For us, it was an eye-opener. This feels like that movie, A Journey to the Center of the Earth. With just the light from our headlamps, we waded through a tunnel that had been flooded with cold water to cool it down. Then we grabbed a chairlift,

cut through a channel of rock, except this one went down. This is like the best Disney ride ever. Picture five of New York's World Trade Centers stacked on top of each other. That's how deep in the earth we are. We're stopped for a second. I hope it's a second. We have to get off? Yeah. When the chairlift stopped suddenly, we had to hike down the last 50 yards to the bottom. Then, at the end of an abandoned tunnel, our scientists found something amazing. I've been looking for 20 years for a salty water deposit like this at depth.

Never found it until now. White patches on the wall turned out to be salt. Is that edible? I don't know. He's tried it. He's tried it? What salt? This is ancient salt?

That's the question. It has to be. It's very, very salty. And the source? This dripping salt water. What does that tell you? It tells me this water is extremely old, because in these rock formations, they were formed 3 billion years ago. There weren't salt deposits back then. They believe this water could be all that's left of an ancient ocean.

And where there's water, there can be life. We could be looking at something which has never seen the life that has evolved on the surface of the planet. All from this cave two miles down in South Africa. All from gold mines in South Africa. Yeah, exactly. In 2011, they found what no one thought possible. These tiny worms living in a pocket of water 5,000 years old. What you're seeing is magnified. These worms are no bigger than a human hair.

It was a species never before seen. It survives without sunlight, deep in the hot underworld. So they called it Mephisto, or the devil. That's where my worms live. They eat bacteria. The first worm you found was in something like that? Yeah. Using an endoscope camera, they were the first to film this deep inside the Earth's crust. This is the devil worm's home. Before this, no one thought animal life could exist this deep.

You made a big discovery. For me, it is big because, for me personally, I had to fight quite a lot of people to be able to do this. On a personal level, that was the biggest victory for me. In the total grand scheme of things, it's just a worm. It's just a worm. It's just a worm. They were surprised to find other living creatures, too. So many, they called them a zoo, a crustacean, about one-sixty-fourth of an inch,

an arthropod, a flatworm, and single-cell bacteria. It set off a storm of speculation about where else extreme life might exist, perhaps even on Mars. NASA helped fund their research. If there is life here in the deep, then you should definitely dig on Mars because if life was ever there, you will find some life form, I believe very strongly, still on Mars. So the Martians we meet in the future could be these single-cell organisms you're talking about? Yes, indeed. I think that would be the most likely. But be prepared to be surprised, I would say. South Africa's gold mines are now so deep they might as well be on another planet.

I'm not sure that we really want to send human beings much deeper. Bernard Swanepoel started his career underground and ended it as the CEO of Harmony Gold, which now owns Moab Katsong. If you are in a successful mining team, it must be like a successful sports team. I mean, mining is one of those activities where at the end of every shift, you know whether you won or lost.

Gold was the lifeblood of South Africa. The way it's dug out has changed little since apartheid, when underpaid black miners often worked in mortal danger. At its worst, more than 800 workers a year died in mining accidents. No coincidence, the struggle that led to apartheid's defeat started underground. Gold and gold mining seem to be in the DNA of South Africa. South African gold mining especially has always been at the center of all political and other activities in our country. I mean, how bad apartheid history is intertwined with gold mining. I mean, a lot of the legislation to dispossess black people of land

was in order to create cheap labor for South African gold mines. You grew up in a small mining town during the era of apartheid. What are your strongest memories? Well, ultimately, I'm a privileged person that because I was white and I was male, those were the two requirements at the time to become a mining engineer. So are you the new face of South African mining?

I would say yes. We are the new generation in South African mining? I would say yes. We are the new generation in the mining. Yeah. Just a dozen years after apartheid ended, engineer Manga Kasango started managing the smelter. He told us he chose to move here from the Congo to work in the mines. Has that wound in South Africa been healed? Not 100% healed, but there's some

healing happening. There's some healing, yes, because we have different people working in the mines, and the mindset has been changing. Now, safety is paramount. You will find women underground, and blacks are senior managers. Once, some of the lowest-paid laborers are now among the highest. But this generation of gold miners know they may be the last. Of the 11 gold mines that once flourished around here, only three still operate. The mines are now so deep it's becoming too expensive to get the gold out. The story of the ultra-deep mines

is nearing its final chapter. To dig the riches from such astounding depths took grit and brute force. Now South Africa's resolve must be deployed to solving the next challenge. What to do when the gold runs out? Back in the 1980s, a laboratory of misfits foresaw our future. Touchscreens, automated driving instructions, wearable technology, and electronic ink were all developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in a place they call the Media Lab. It's a research lab and graduate school program that long ago outgrew its name.

Last year, we first told you how it's creating technologies to grow food in the desert, control our dreams, and connect the human brain to the Internet. Come have a look at what we found in a place you could call the Future Factory. To Arnav Kapoor, a graduate student in the media lab, the future is silent. He's developed a system to surf the Internet with his mind. What happens is when you're reading or when you're talking to yourself, your brain transmits electrical signals to your vocal cords.

You can actually pick these signals up, and you can get certain clues as to what the person intends to speak. So the brain is sending an electrical signal for a word that you would normally speak, but your device is intercepting that signal. It is. So instead of speaking the word, your device is sending it into a computer. That's correct. That's unbelievable. Let's see how this works. So, we tried it.

What is 45,689 divided by 67? Sure. He silently asks the computer, and then hears the answer through vibrations transmitted through his skull and into his inner ear. Six, eight, one, 0.9, two, five. Exactly right. One more. What's the largest city in Bulgaria, and what is the population? The screen shows how long it takes the computer to read the

words that he's saying to himself. Sophia, 1.1 million. That is correct. You just googled that. I did. You could be an expert in any subject. You had the entire internet in your head. That's the idea. Ideas are the currency of MIT's Media Lab. The lab is a six-story tower of Babel, where 230 graduate students speak dialects of art, engineering, biology,

physics, and coding, all translated into innovation. The Media Lab is this glorious mixture, this renaissance, where we break down these formal disciplines and we mix it all up and we see what pops out. That's the magic, that intellectual diversity. Hugh Herr is a professor who leads an advanced prosthetics lab. And what do you get from that?

You get this craziness when you put like a toy designer next to a person that's thinking about what instruments will look like in the future next to someone like me that's interfacing machines to the nervous system. You get really weird technologies. You get things that no one could have conceived of. The Media Lab was conceived in a 1984 proposal. MIT's Nicholas Negroponte wrote, computers are media that will lead to interactive systems. He predicted the rise of flat panel displays, HDTVs, and news whenever you want it. Negroponte became co-founder of the lab and its director for 20 years. When we were demonstrating these things in, let's say, 85, 86, 87, it was really considered new.

It looked like magic. It was indistinguishable from magic. You are going to meet on Main Street. In 1979, MIT developed MovieMap, which predated Google Street View by decades. Now, notice what's so common today that you didn't even notice it. He's touching the screen. If you had seen that on 60 Minutes in the 80s, you would have been amazed. And you might have been dazzled by one of the earliest flat screens. It was six inches by six inches, black and white.

It was a $500,000 piece of glass. It cost a half a million dollars. It cost half a million dollars, that piece of glass. And I said, that piece of glass will be six feet and diagonal with millions of pixels in full color. In 1997, the lab also gave birth to the grandfather of Siri and Alexa. Nomadic wake up. Okay, I'm listening. Go to my email. Where do you want to go? And in 1989, it created turn-by-turn navigation that it called backseat driver. They're right at the stop sign.

And the MIT patent lawyers looked at it and said, this will never happen, never be done, because the insurance companies won't allow it, so we're not going to patent it. Look through the glass-walled labs today, and you will witness 400 projects in the making. The lab is developing pacemaker batteries recharged by the beating of the heart. Self-driving taxi tricycles that you summon with your phone. Phones that do retinal eye exams. Ariana, I will tell you two stories.

And teaching robots. So we think that the devices of tomorrow have an opportunity to do so much more and to fit better in our lives. Professor Patty Maas ran the graduate program student admissions for more than a decade. We really select for people who have a passion. We don't have to tell them to work hard. We have to tell them to work less hard and to get sleep occasionally. How often does a student come to you with an idea and you think, we're not going to do that? Actually, for us, the crazier, the better. Typically, there's some blood vessels running. Adam Har-Horowitz's idea was so nutty, he was one of 50 new students admitted out of 1,300 applications.

I was really interested in a state of sleep where you start to dream before you're fully unconscious, where you keep coming up with ideas right as you're about to go to sleep. Time to go to sleep. Har Horowitz's system plants ideas for dreams. Remember to think of a mountain. then records conversations with the dreamer during that semi-conscious moment before you fall asleep. Tell me, what are you thinking? I'm doing an origami pyramid.

Her origami pyramid dream was influenced by the robot saying the word mountain. It's long been believed that this is the moment when the mind is its most creative. Parhorowitz hopes to capture ideas that we often lose by the next morning. So it's basically like a conversation. You can ask, hey, Jibo, I'd like to dream about a rabbit tonight.

It would watch for that trigger of unconsciousness. And then right as you're hitting the lip, it triggers you with the audio, and it asks you, what is it that you're thinking about? You record all that sleep talking, and then later, when you wake up fully, you can ask for those recordings. And when he brought this idea to you, what did you think? Really? Crazy enough.

Yeah. Welcome to the world of bodies and motions. Nearby in Hugh Herr's lab, Everett Lawson's brain is connected to his prosthetic foot, a replacement for the club foot he was born with. The very definition of a leg or a limb or an ankle is going to dramatically change with what they're doing. It isn't just whole, it's 150%. You feel directly connected, huh? Yeah, when I fire a muscle really fast, it makes its full sweep. Herr's team has electronically connected the computers in the robotic foot

with the muscles and nerves in Lawson's leg. He's not only able to control via his thoughts, he can actually feel the designed synthetic limb. He feels the joints moving as if the joints are made of skin and bone. For Professor Herr, necessity was the mother of invention. He lost his legs to frostbite at age 17 after he was stranded by a winter storm while mountain climbing. Through that recovery process, my limbs are amputated. I design my own limbs. I return to my sport of mountain climbing. I was climbing better than I'd achieved with normal biological limbs.

That experience was so inspiring, because I realized the power of technology to heal, to rehabilitate, and even extend human capability beyond natural physiological levels. You develop the legs that you're wearing today. Each leg has three computers actually and 12 sensors, and they run these computations based on the sensory information that's coming in. And then what's controlled is a motor system, like muscle, that drives me as I walk and enables me to walk at different speeds. What will this mean for people with disabilities? Technology is freeing. It removes the shackles of disability from humans. And the vision of the Media Lab is that one day, through advances in technologies, we will eliminate all disability.

So that was a big deal. The current director of the Media Lab is Joey Ito, a four-time college dropout and one of those misfits that the lab prefers. After success in high-tech venture capital, he came here to preside over the lab's 30 faculty and a $75 million annual budget. How do you pay for all this? So we have 90 companies that pay us a membership fee to join the consortium. And then because it's all coming into one pot,

I can distribute the funds to our faculty and students, and they don't have to write grant proposals. You don't have to ask for permission. They just make things. Do any of these companies lean on you from time to time and say, hey, we need some product here? They do. I've fired companies for that. You've fired them? Yeah, I've told companies you're too bottom-line oriented.

Maybe we're not right for you. The sponsors, which include Lego, the toy maker, Toshiba, ExxonMobil, and General Electric, get first crack at inventions. The lab holds 302 patents and counting. We're inside of the lab. Caleb Harper's idea is so big it doesn't fit in the building. So MIT donated the site of an abandoned particle accelerator for this trained architect who is now building farms.

Welcome to the farm. He calls these food computers, farms where conditions are perfect. They're all capable of controlling climate. So they make a recipe. This much CO2, this much O2, this temperature. So we create a world in a box. Most people understand if you say, oh, the tomatoes in Tuscany on the North Slope taste so good and you can't get them anywhere else. That's those genetics under those

conditions that cause that beautiful tomato. So we study that inside of these boxes with sensors and the ability to control climate. Tuscany in a box. Tuscany in a box, Napa in a box, Bordeaux in a box. Now these are plants you're growing in air. Yeah, so this is... These basil plants grow not in soil, but in air. The plant is super happy. No dirt. Air saturated with a custom mix of moisture and nutrients.

So each one of these are drops that drops down to the reservoir. The food computers grow almost anything, anywhere. What have you learned about cotton farming? So cotton is actually a perennial plant, which means it would grow, you know, the almost anything anywhere. What have you learned about cotton farming? So cotton is actually a perennial plant, which means it would grow the whole year long, but it's treated like an annual. We have a season. So in this environment, since it's perfect for cotton,

we've had plants go 12 months. So how many crops can you get in a controlled environment like this? You can crop up to four or five seasons. We're growing on average three to four times faster than they can grow in the field. The uncommon growth of the media lab flows from its refusal to be bound to goals, contracts, or next quarter's profits. It is simply a ship of exploration going wherever a crazy idea may lead. We get to think about the future. What does the world look like 10 years, 20 years, 30 years? Exploration. Going wherever a crazy idea may lead. We get to think about the future.

What does the world look like 10 years, 20 years, 30 years? What should it look like? The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Researchers at the Media Lab continue to make advances. Arnav Kapoor's headset that allowed him to surf the Internet with his mind is now the size of a band-aid. Hugh Herr has helped more amputees, and Caleb Harper's food computers are growing disease-fighting herbs. I'm Scott Pelley. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.